Ensim Unify helps service providers manage VoIP and similar solutions as hosted services.

by Jeff Goldman [September 26, 2007]

Ensim Corporation was founded in 1998 to provide management platforms for Web hosting providers. In 2003, the company released Ensim Unify, a broader platform that was designed to help service providers and telecom companies get to market quickly with a wide range of applications.

At the time, that mostly meant supporting messaging and collaboration for small to medium sized businesses, says Francois Depayras, Ensim's vice president of sales and marketing. "Ensim basically decided to focus on unified communications," he says—meaning messaging, collaboration, IM presence and telephony.

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Ensim's acquisition of Telegea in 2005, Depayras says, enabled the company to start offering the same kind of support for VoIP that it had been doing for other areas of communication. "2005 was really the year when Ensim focused its energies not just on messaging and collaboration but on unified communications as a whole," he says.

As a result, Ensim Unify now enables service providers to offer hosted voice over IP to their customers—with a key caveat that's true for all aspects of the solution. "We don't provide the application ourselves," Depayras says, "We just create the management tool that allows for the provisioning, automation, change management of users and employees at any given time."

Managing unified communications
Unify, Depayras says, comes with pre-built connectors to a wide range of different unified communications solutions. "One of the things that we understood early on was that service providers primarily were successful when they were selling bundles of hosted services, rather than a specific single service, to their customers," he says.

And so while a provider could use Ensim Unify just with a VoIP deployment, the solution is specifically designed to support a number of different services at once. "We have pre-built connectors to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, Siemens OpenScape, RIM BlackBerry, BroadSoft's BroadWorks, things of this nature that allow our customers to have bundles of services that they can mix and match," Depayras says.

Taking on new offerings can be a real challenge for service providers, Depayras says, both in terms of the time it takes to deploy those services and the challenges inherent in managing them. "And so this is where we thought that we had a great fit—we could plug into an existing infrastructure and automate the provisioning and the delivery of multiple hosted services," he says.

Towards that end, Unify provides a Web-based management portal with distinct access levels for the service provider, for resellers, for enterprise administrators, and for end users. "What we wanted to offer was the ability for any service provider to very easily engage with resellers and provide them with the exact same capability that they have with our software," Depayras says.

Empowering customers
Depayras says one key benefit of that system is that it gives customers independent control. "We're letting people manage themselves," he says. "Usually, an enterprise likes to be able to say, 'Well, we have five new employees that are coming in next month, we're going to open five new lines for them—and we'll just go do that from our management area,'" he says.

When a service provider is able to give that kind of independence to resellers and enterprise customers on a wide range of services, Depayras says, the result is simple. "It dramatically decreases the cost of support," he says.

It also simplifies things for the service provider. "What it allows our service providers to do is to use a single, integrated management solution for multiple hosted services," Depayras says. "That's really the main benefit."

Pricing for Ensim Unify is based on a recurring fee per user per month—Depayras says Ensim's intention in pricing it that way was to minimize up-front costs. "We've got a very, very small up-front fee that provides training and so forth, and then once the customer is deployed, we charge them per user, per line, per mailbox, per mobile device—any of those things," he says. "This basically allows us to tell them, 'If you're successful, fantastic: we'll be successful with you. If you're not, then we're sharing the risk.'"

And while about 75 percent of Ensim's customers manage at least four hosted services with Unify, Depayras says, some customers do use the solution only for VoIP. Still, as he points out, "if somebody agrees to outsource their e-mail needs or their voice over IP needs to you, then there is a great deal of chances that you'll be able to upsell all of the other services that are required by IT."

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